Announcing The Coolhead Business App of the Week

We’re launching a new column here at Coolhead Tech that we think businesses interested in the cloud are going to love. Over the coming months we’ll be publishing a weekly write up on some of our favorite and most useful companion apps for Google Apps for Business, as well as some of our all-time favorite cloud based business apps.

Google Apps for Business and the Apps Marketplace

We’re big Google Apps fans here at Coolhead and we’re using the business productivity suite and a number of the companion apps daily within our organization. Google Apps has delivered powerful new ways to share and collaborate, but not only that, it has made our operation so much more efficient than how it would be with traditional productivity suites.

As if Apps for Business wasn’t enough, Google made a great choice by opening up their ecosystem to developers who saw even more potential within Google Apps. Now there’s a busy marketplace with a number of companion apps that help you get to extract all you can from google apps, while also introducing new features and tools that aren’t a part of the core service.

One of the biggest red flags that businesses come up against when investigating a switch to Google Apps is that they see missing features when comparing the suite to their current solution. It’s true that if you look at only the core Google Apps for Business feature set there are things missing. There’s no advanced data protection systems, no backups, and no options for configuring security based around traditional security policies that businesses are already used to.

Well… actually there are, and those are the type of Apps that we’ll be showcasing.

We want to remove the negatives that businesses see in switching to Google Apps by removing roadblocks in the process. At the same time, we’ll be educating current Google Apps users on features and plugins that they might not have known about.

In the future, it’s likely that a large part of your company’s productivity tasks will be performed in the cloud. The companion apps allow you to take more of what you’re doing in to the cloud NOW.

More than just GoogleBusiness Apps

At Coolhead, Google Apps is not the only cloud solution that we use and support. Google Apps and the companion apps are perfect for a large chunk of your operation, but there are other cloud solutions that can also make business easier.

Did you ever consider that you could do all of your accounting and invoicing within the cloud? One of our favorite apps is FreshBooks, a cloud accounting solution that does more than just crunch numbers. It’s a hub for invoicing, onward-billing, recording your own company’s expenses, and even tracking jobs that are in progress to provide immediate and accurate billing to customers. The app can also take care of setting up payment gateways so that your customers will have online options to pay for your products or services.

FreshBooks is just one example of a powerful cloud application that can perform tasks that are likely separated within your current business model, all within one application that saves you money and improves efficiency.

Look for the Coolhead Business App of the Week in Upcoming Posts

The biggest advantage to cloud technology for businesses is streamlining workflow and reducing cost overheads.

There are a lot of businesses who want to move in to the cloud but haven’t discovered all of the value that the switch would bring, or haven’t found the right solutions that make for an attractive business decision.

Whether you want to expand on the cloud solutions you’re already using, or you’re missing that final piece of the puzzle that will make the cloud more viable to your business, we’ll be showcasing the apps that make the most compelling arguments for cloud technology today.